This was a new one on MrConsumer. A New York friend recently called to say he was getting deluged with spam all of a sudden — over 120 in an hour. They kept mounting up in his inbox and for some reason they generally were not even going into his spam folder.

In the midst of this flurry of junk mail, he was trying to do his taxes and started reviewing his American Express account online. He noticed a $2000+ pending charge at Build.com. My friend knew immediately he did not make that purchase so he called AMEX. They canceled his card on the spot since its use at that online store was fraudulent.

My poor friend, one minute he is being spammed to death and the next he is the victim of credit card fraud. How unlucky can one get to have these two independent events happen to you in the span of an hour? Or were they really a coincidence?

MrConsumer postulates they were all part of a grand scheme by a very clever crook. Someone clearly gained access to my friend’s existing Build.com account which might have had his American Express number saved for future use. Or the scammer separately obtained his American Express account number some other way. With that information, it was easy to make a purchase (or many of them) and send the loot to anyone in the country.

But what does that have to do with the spam bomb that my friend experienced? Since online sellers usually immediately send a purchase confirmation email after an order is placed, the crook had to do something to lessen the chance that my friend would see it in his in-box. So he bombarded him with tons of spam emails at the very time the order confirmation was likely to be received hoping it would go unnoticed, get mistaken for spam, and be deleted along with the rest of the junk mail.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Fortunately, my friend was able to contact Build.com in time to cancel the order slated for next day delivery. Their security system also flagged the transaction.

So here’s the moral of the story. If all of a sudden you get hit with an unusually large deluge of spam, go through each one looking for an order(s) you never placed. Call your primary credit card issuer(s) to ask about any unusual activity they see on your account, including recent purchases and address changes. Delete any saved credit card numbers from online stores where you make purchases. And change passwords on any affected accounts.